These are unedited, not guaranteed to be accurate, and in any case should not
be construed as including literal quotes of what people said.
SD, TS, DB, Chuck P, Analia Cillis, JB, Nico Giglietto, WF, PN (8:30)
SD - Collab meeting focus was on science analyses, but not on technical issues
of the science tools. The science working groups will have to be self
supporting for tool development beyond the SAE.
Databases
TS - No reaction to committee yet. Put in our request for quotes for
production server and will have hardware in place by the end of the year; in
terms of development there's nothing really new.
SD - HEASARC owns the disks?
TS - We are buying the disks and they are providing the servers except for the
LAT photon data, for which the GSSC has the servers and disks.
Likelihood
(from conversation with Jim)
Jim has fixed, or is in the process of fixing, a couple of bugs: with how one-sided time-range cuts (say when only a lower-limit is specified) are handled and with how the diffuse response columns are named by gtdiffresp when event class cuts have been made.
In the near term he is also working on a method to speed up evaluations of the likelihood function by not recomputing parts that relate to sources whose parameters are not changing, such as sources in the border region around a region of interest. I think that the suggestion for doing this came from Jean. The implementation certainly has to be done carefully but could make a marked improvement for evaluation of models with a lot of static sources.
AC - Introducing confidence level of threshold for warning - of deviation of
model from data
SD - Is this a spatial comparison or just spectral?
AC - Comparing counts in each energy bin with the total of the contributions in
each bin.
GRBs
DB - No news
SD - Temporal, spectral analyses of GRBs - I have not thought about for a long
time - any news?
DB - Will look into it
Pulsars
TS - At collab meeting I talked with David Smith for a while; they have been
working on translating ephemerides from radio timers into our D4 format; they
have some scripts up and running and have some bugs to work out; but when they
have it going we'll set up a pipeline at GSSC and they will be able to deliver
values for concatentation.
DB - In the SAE is there a standard directory where we keep the D4 file? Also,
someone here is working on X-ray pulsar ephemerides - who should she talk to
about providing the data for the database? Also, issue about keeping the
database up-to-date on people's installation - the D4 database will get stale.
SD - Good questions. Ephem file should not be distributed with the science
tools.
DB - File will have a version number on it, I suppose, so will know when it is
updated. So if you update your file you should update your PIL file and change
the name of it
SD - Regarding the X-ray timing information - Dave Thompson would be the
contact
DB - Yes, should have procedure worked out for receiving these
From Masa: "The pulsar tools now accept one more time format (MJD in addition
to GLAST) and two more time systems (TAI and UTC in addition to TDB and TAI) for
manual input of a time, such as a reference time (reftime) and an ephemeris
epoch (ephepoch). What we plan to do in this build cycle are: cleaning up the
codes, testing, identifying/fixing bugs, and updating manuals."
User interface
SD - News from JP on APE -> PIL "From James: "James began work to
reconcile differences between the new parameter interface (Ape) and the Ciao
tools parameter interface. The goal is to matching behavior with all major
parameter-based astronomical software packages as a prelude for introducing Ape
into the Science Tools."
CP - Updated the 'splash page' for the science tools in the workbook to include
summaries of the core science tools. Also working with Vincent to get the
gtsrcid documenation into the science tools
DB - Status of the Cicerone - 2 major sections have nothing - one is on
observation simulation and the other is pulsars. I drafted some text for both -
and gave Masa first crack on the pulsar text for comments. In general I have
not received comments on very much of the text. This is going to be a
widely-read introduction to the science tools and will be seen by the user
committee in a little more than a month. I really want to beef this up and turn
it in to something that will give people confidence that we know what we are
doing with the tools. I encourage everyone to look at what is posted.
Regarding Obs sim - we are talking about how it might look to the user - so have
not worked on that section, rather than get into the XML descriptions, etc.
HEAD meeting
DB - Chris is away, and may be back at the end of the week - I saw a
schedule with names of people from here. My impression is that we are not
planning to have demos of the tools, but should ask Chris about that. In
general with the users committee, the intention is to roll out the tools later
rather than earlier - first of all, users are not actually going to be analyzing
count data until a year into the launch. Also want to make sure that the
interface has converged.
SD - Good points, do you know who is coming out?
DB - Not entirely yet; I'm hoping to coming for the first couple of days; CS is
going, and 2 or 3 others; some health issues
TS - Don Horner is going from the SSC; I'm going to the ADASS meeting the next
week